July 29, 2012

David Reich gives us some more hints

From 7:24 onwards:

For example people often think that Europeans are homogeneous group that arrived in a simple way there maybe 40 or 50 thousand years ago maybe based on the archaeology and just kind of sat there until they became the Europeans they are today, but that's probably not true: the Europeans today are a replacement population who came in much more recently and replaced the people who were there originally 40 thousand years ago.

People in Africa certainly very diverse, but in fact there is very deep strands of variation in Africa and for example West Africans, people, the primary ancestral group of African Americans today, are actually turn out to be mixtures of very differently diverged groups that go very deep in time. So this is all very interesting, also true for East Asians, people in China today are not the same people who were there from the first time 40 thousand years ago, in fact they are a replacement population largely, that arrived after the first people there. So you see this history of more complex population movements than people think at first.

7 comments:

"the Europeans today are a replacement population who came in much more recently and replaced the people who were there originally 40 thousand years ago."

West Asians, right?

Dienekes, I've been following your works on the genetic past of Europe. From what I understand, hunter-gatherers bore the most resemblance to the Atlanto-Baltic and Northern European component and from around 10,000 B.C.E to 4,000 B.C.E. they were mostly replaced by farmers from West Asia (Anatolia, Armenia, Northern Mesopotamia).

However, it seems that present day Europeans share few of the West Asian component compared to other components including the Atlanto-Baltic.

So what happened during the last thousand years? Do Europeans today come mostly from West Asia or not?

No word about Aboriginal Australians, particularly from North Australia?

What does the single Australian Aboriginal genome show us when SNPs are ascertained on the "earlier" migration component that was detected? Are later Southeast Asians a "replacement" population as well? (In the same way that many South Asians are a "replacement" population when compared to Andaman Islanders.)

Almost certainly so. SE Asians have a very substantial input of Mongoloid genes from further north. The populations of parts of SE Asia show some of the pre-Mongoloid characteristics. For example many Timorese look almost Papuan. And Papuans have very little Mongoloid genetics. However I think the SE Asian story is even more complicated because Papuans look different from most Australian Aborigines, except those from the north.

"There are two indigenous groups in Australia: Australian Aborigines and Torres Straits Islanders. The latter are Papuan in language, culture and appearance".

That's what I was hinting at with, 'However I think the SE Asian story is even more complicated because Papuans look different from most Australian Aborigines, except those from the north'. But I didn't want to complicate the issue.

"The Indonesians believe their nenek moyang, the ancestors of my grandparents, were of Negrito appearance".

To me the evidence is overwhelming that the earlier Indonesian inhabitants looked like modern Papuans (or Negritos in some regions) who have been overlaid by a more recent Mongoloid phenotype (Austronesian being just a part of that more recent immigration).

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